COMMENTS

Professor Laborde warns against the reactivist response to
the Paris murders: they misunderstand the role played by free speech and by laïcité. Further, they allow criminals to
set the term of the debate on how to better facilitate Muslim integration if
France.Professor Cécile Laborde26 February 2015 More...

The notion of ‘disturbing pasts’ refers to the experience of war and violence. But the aim is to understand how and why these experiences continue to disturb a later present, and how some people later disturb an apparently dormant past. The focus is on conflicting, unexpected and often dissonant interpretations and representations of these events among both those who were the witnesses, victims and perpetrators of these events and among different communities in the generations that followed. On a theoretical level, therefore, one objective of this conference is to raise challenges to the widely used and yet under-theorized concept of ‘collective memory’.

For the purposes of this conference, ‘disturbance’ is addressed on three different levels which interrelate in what might be called a ‘dialectics of disturbance’:

Those aspects of the past that remain disturbing, however hard people try to repress, forget, contain or silence this past

The ways in which people later actively ‘disturb’ this past; processes of confronting, interacting and dealing with the past, that in turn affect and alter how it is perceived and what its implications are for a later present

The often disturbing ethical questions raised in relation to the role of the analyst, historian and writer confronting this past.

Key issues include:

TRANSMISSION: How are experiences of war and violence transmitted between andacross communities and generations?

EMBODIMENTS: How were the experiences of war and violence and their memories inscribed onto the human body? How is the body used to make sense of or deal with these experiences, whether in daily life or in artistic interventions?

REPRESENTATION: How are the experiences of war and violence represented in various media (films, literature, memorials, autobiographical accounts, press) and what is the wider impact of these representations on changing social perceptions?

DISPLACEMENT AND IDENTIFICATION: How did people interpret and deal with the experience of losing their home and making a new one elsewhere? What roles do place/space play for identify construction.

'"Mein Führer, I can walk!” References to the Nazi Past in the Making and Reception of Dr. Strangelove (1964)', Peter Krämer (UEA)

'The Past is Still Present: Representing the Second World War in Ordinary Fascism (documentary, Mikhail Romm, USSR, 1965)', Alissa Timoshkina (KCL)

'Travelling to Remember, Travelling to Forget. German tourists in Europe and reminders of a disturbing past', Julia Wagner (UCL)

11.00-1.00pm

'Comedy – or more precisely: the pure joke – is the essential inner side of mourning which from time to time, like the lining of a dress at the hem or lapel, makes its presence felt.” On comedy and suffering in post-war German texts', Stephanie Bird (UCL)

'Creating a better Future by Disturbing the Past? Young West-Germans as Reconciliation Activists in the 1960s and 1970s', Christiane Wienand (UCL)

'Disturbing, Changing and Controversial Memories of the WWII in Belarus', Anna Zadroa (Strasbourg)

'From Oblivion to Complex Memoryscape: The Changing Significance of the Łódź Ghetto for the Local Community after 1945 as a Result of Interethnic and Interinstitutional Transmission of Memory', Ulrike Lang (Munich)